Mariam Papian is the architect of circular beauty.
A raw, intimate interview conducted in the artist’s working studio in Yerevan, where recycled materials become sculpture, ideas become objects, and a quiet revolution happens one hand-crafted piece at a time.
The studio doesn’t look like a usual one. No polished gallery vibes, no Instagram-ready displays. Just… mess. Real mess. The kind that comes from actually making things.
Scraps of recycled paper everywhere curled up on tables, overlapping, some crushed. Felted textiles draped haphazardly on wooden frames, some barely started, others half-done. You can see the thinking in them, the trial and error. Shelves lined with unfinished pieces. Objects waiting. Not in some precious, curated way, but genuinely waiting because the maker doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be yet. Maybe they never will. Maybe that’s the point.
There’s no pretense here. Just someone working, leaving traces, coming back, changing their mind, trying again. The chaos isn’t aesthetic. It’s just what happens when you’re trying to figure something out.
Mariam moves through her studio with the ease of someone who has years here. She knows where everything is, not because it’s organized in any conventional sense, but because every scrap, every material, every abandoned experiment has a story and a purpose. She offers tea and settles into a chair in the middle of the workspace, surrounded by the physical evidence of her philosophy.
“Thank you for coming here,” she says, gesturing at the studio. “I wanted you to see this place. It’s important that you see where the thinking actually happens.”
We begin, naturally, with how she got here.
“For twenty years, I was an interior designer,” she says, her voice carrying the weight of someone reflecting on a long journey. “And in all those twenty years, there was always something missing.”
She pauses, choosing her words carefully.
“The work was maybe thirty percent creative, sixty percent… not creative. Meetings about budgets. Client compromises. Beautiful spaces that felt hollow because they weren’t solving anything real. I would finish a project, move on to the next one, and feel this gnawing sense that I was just moving things around. Creating comfort, yes. But not meaning.”
This frustration didn’t breed bitterness. Instead, it became the soil from which @mashe.living would eventually grow.
“I was introduced to felting, and something shifted,” she continues. “I started asking: How do I integrate this technique into what I already know? How do I use materials that people throw away and turn them into something functional? Something that matters?”
What began as experimentation, shoes, bags, clothing made from recycled materials,wasn’t initially a “brand.” There was no business plan, no Instagram strategy. It was pure exploration, driven by something almost visceral: a refusal to let things disappear into landfills.
“It got on my nerves,” she says with a slight laugh. “Throwing things away. Still does. I would think: What can I make? How can this become something useful and*beautiful? How can it become art?”
The turning point came when she began working with recycled paper. Not as an afterthought material, but as a serious medium worthy of deep experimentation.
“I realized I could take something that was already trash,literally waste paper,and through material research, through patience, through trial and failure, turn it into something with presence. Something with a story. Something people actually wanted to live with.”
But this wasn’t about recycling for recycling’s sake. That misses the point entirely.
“I don’t want this to be only about recycling,” she emphasizes. “That’s too simple. It’s a *professional problem* that requires a professional solution. The world isn’t going to stop using plastic or fast fashion tomorrow. That’s not realistic. But what happens to all of it afterwards? That’s the question that keeps me awake.”
She leans forward slightly, and you can feel the shift in her energy,this is where her real passion lives.
“We’re not thinking about prevention. We’re thinking about after. When something is done being used, what can it become? A recycled sweater could become filling for a couch. Textile waste could become insulation, sculpture, functional art. The cycle never ends. There’s always another life for the material.”
This is what she calls circular design, not a trend, but a fundamental reimagining of how we create and consume.
When I ask how she turns recycled materials into pieces that feel elevated and desirable, not like craft projects or well-meaning environmental statements, her answer is disarmingly honest.
“Years of experience,” she says simply. “Anyone can take a material and play with it. But can it become an art object? Can it become desirable ? That requires something else. It requires being an artist and a designer. It requires knowing how to elevate the material through a professional approach.”
She picks up a piece of felted textile from a nearby table, running her fingers across it. You can see the texture, the intentionality, the restraint in the design.
“This is the difference between a maker and a designer,” she continues. “A maker creates. A designer solves problems. I learned that the hard way, over two decades. You can’t shortcut it. You can’t fake it.”
There’s something almost defensive about the way she says this, and I realize: she’s fought hard to be taken seriously. To be seen as a designer, not a craftsperson. To have her work viewed as intellectual work, not just manual labor. The distinction matters to her in a way that goes deeper than semantics.
Despite the romantic vision of artisanal creation, Mariam has learned that scaling sustainable design comes with brutal challenges.
“My biggest order,” she recalls, “was for a hotel. Four hundred fixtures. Each one hand-crafted. Each one is an individual.”
The challenge wasn’t inspirational. It was logistics, consistency, and material sourcing.
“How do you maintain the integrity of the material when you’re working at that scale? How do you keep each piece alive, individual, meaningful, when you’re producing hundreds? How do you source enough recycled material to make it work without compromising the quality?”
She shakes her head, and I can hear the exhaustion in the gesture.
“It’s not romantic. It’s hard. You’re managing inventory, relationships with material suppliers, deadlines. You’re negotiating between your vision and what’s actually possible. And every compromise feels like a small death. Every decision to use a slightly different material because you can’t find the right one feels like you’re betraying something.”
She picks up her tea, which has gone cold. She drinks it anyway.
“People see the finished object and they think: how beautiful, how simple. They don’t see the months of sourcing, the failed batches, the nights you couldn’t sleep because you couldn’t solve a technical problem. They don’t see the cost. And I mean the emotional cost, not just the financial one.”
Here’s where Mariam gets vulnerable. Building a sustainable brand isn’t just about creativity and materials. It requires business acumen, and that’s where many designers lose themselves.
“Balancing creativity and sustainability, that’s easy,” she says. “They feed each other. But then you add business, and everything becomes complicated.”
She speaks from hard won experience.
“If you’re a creative person without a business mind, you need someone to help you. But here’s the danger: that person brings business priorities, and suddenly the philosophy gets diluted. Suddenly you’re making decisions based on profit margins instead of purpose. And before you know it, you’ve drifted so far from why you started that you don’t recognize your own work anymore.”
I ask if this has happened to her.
She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, she stands and walks to a shelf where several pieces sit. She picks one up, it’s beautiful, clearly executed with skill, but something seems off about it. Less alive than the others, somehow. More commercial.
“This one,” she says quietly. “I made this because a buyer wanted it. Not because I needed to make it. And you can tell, can’t you? The soul is missing.”
She sets it back down carefully, almost apologetically, as if the piece can feel her judgment.
“The solution isn’t to hire a business manager and step back,” she continues. “It’s to learn to hold both things, creativity and commerce, in tension, without letting either one dominate. But honestly? It’s the hardest thing I do.”
There’s a rawness to her admission that feels important. This isn’t a success story with clean answers. This is someone actively struggling with the contradictions inherent in turning art into business, philosophy into product.
“You have to be vigilant,” she says. “Every decision is a small test. Does this align with the philosophy or does it compromise it? If you can’t answer that question honestly, you’re in trouble. And some days, I can’t answer it. Some days I just make the choice that keeps the lights on and tells myself it’s temporary. But temporary has a way of becoming permanent.”
When I ask about trends in contemporary design, Mariam’s answer suggests she’s been paying close attention to what’s happening globally, but also locally.
“Material research,” she says immediately. “That’s the big one. The question isn’t what anymore, it’s how and from what. Where is this coming from? What’s the story of this material? That fascinates me because it means people are finally asking the right questions.”
She also sees craftsmanship making a quiet comeback.
“Hand-making is returning,” she observes. “Not as nostalgia, but as resistance. People are tired of factory-made, disposable things. There’s something about an object made by human hands that carries presence. In Armenian, we say \u0533\u0561\u0572\u0561\u0583\u0561\u0580\u0561\u056d\u0578\u057d\u0578\u0582\u0569\u0575\u0561\u0576 \u0574\u0565\u057b, within craftsmanship. There’s something sacred about that. And I think the world is hungry for sacredness again. We’ve been living in cheap, disposable, soulless things for so long. We’re starving for something real.”
But there’s a warning beneath her optimism, and I can hear it.
“The danger is that hand-crafted will become another trend, another marketing term. Another way to charge more money for something. And then it loses its meaning. Then it becomes just another luxury product for people with enough money to afford their conscience.”
She doesn’t elaborate, but she doesn’t need to. The implication hangs there: she’s aware of the contradiction she’s part of. She’s aware that sustainable, hand-crafted design is, by necessity, expensive. She’s aware that she’s creating objects for people who can afford to care.
I ask what she hopes people experience when they encounter her work. Her answer is revealing in its simplicity.
“Presence,” she says without hesitation. “I want them to feel the aliveness of the object. An emotional attachment. Not because it’s trendy or sustainable, those are just facts, but because something in the object speaks to something in them.”
She pauses, and her voice becomes quieter.
“I want them to love it. To feel that it has a life, a story, a reason for existing. When you pick up one of my pieces, I want you to know that hands made this. That thought went into this. That this object has meaning beyond its function.”
But then she adds something unexpected.
“And I want them to feel guilty,” she says, and there’s no softness in her voice now. “Not guilty in a paralyzing way. But guilty enough to think twice before they throw something away. Guilty enough to ask themselves: what is this object to me? What does it deserve from me? Am I going to honor the hours of work that went into making this, or am I going to toss it in a bin in five years?”
There’s an intensity to this that catches me off guard.
“People don’t think about objects that way anymore. We’ve been trained to consume and discard. To see things as temporary. I want to disrupt that. I want my objects to haunt them a little bit. To ask them questions they don’t want to answer.”
When I ask what wisdom she’d offer to young designers starting out, she’s surprisingly stern.
“First: understand what design actually is,” she says. “Being a designer doesn’t mean making beautiful things. Being a designer means seeing a problem and finding a solution*. That’s it. That’s the entire job.”
She continues with intensity, leaning forward.
“When you design something, you’re not working with surfaces. You’re solving something real. Ask yourself: What problem am I solving? Is it a local issue? A sustainability issue? A human issue? The field doesn’t matter. It’s always about problems and solutions. If you’re making something just because it’s pretty, you’re not a designer. You’re a decorator. And there’s nothing wrong with being a decorator, but know the difference.”
I ask if she’s been mistaken for the latter.
She laughs, but it’s not a happy sound.
“All the time,” she says. “People see the objects and they say: oh, how beautiful. And I want to shake them and say: but did you understand the why* Did you see the solution? Or did you just see something pretty and decide you wanted it?”
There’s frustration here, decades of frustration, compressed into a few sentences.
“That’s why I’m teaching now,” she continues. “I need the next generation to understand that design is intellectual work. It’s problem-solving. It’s my responsibility. It’s not decoration.”
And when I ask about the one lesson she wishes she’d known when she began:
“Not being afraid of failure,” she says immediately, but the pause that follows suggests there’s more to it.
“I wish I’d understood that failure isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. Every failed experiment, every piece that didn’t work, every project that fell apart… those weren’t setbacks. They were discoveries.”
She stands and walks to a shelf where several pieces sit, clearly experimental, clearly not finished, clearly not “successful” in any commercial sense.
“These don’t work,” she says, picking them up one by one. “This one is too heavy. This one falls apart if you touch it wrong. This one looks like nothing, it’s just a blob of material. And I’ve wasted hours on these. Days. But I learned something from each one. My hands learned something. My brain learned something. And that learning is in every piece I make now.”
She sets them back down carefully.
“You can have a million ideas, but ideas mean nothing without execution. You have to do the work. You have to have patience. And you have to see failure not as something unlucky but as a road to growth. The lesson is: keep going. Always keep going.”
Her voice cracks slightly on that last sentence, and I realize she’s not just giving advice to young designers. She’s reminding herself. She’s at a point in her career where she’s questioning whether she should keep going, and the only answer she can give is the one she’s always given: yes. Keep going.
As the afternoon light starts to shift in the studio, Mariam settles back into her chair. There’s a tiredness about her that wasn’t visible at the beginning of our conversation, or perhaps it was always there and I’m only now seeing it clearly.
“People romanticize this work,” she says, unprompted. “They see the beautiful objects and they imagine it’s all creative flow and meaningful purpose. But it’s also lonely. It’s financial instability. It’s the constant anxiety of sourcing materials, of meeting deadlines, of wondering if you’re making the right ethical choices when you’re running a business.”
I ask if she has regrets.
“No,” she says, but the word hangs there for a long time. “No regrets. But I have exhaustion. I have doubts. I have moments where I think: what if I’d just stayed in interior design? What if I’d made more money, had more security, had more time to rest?”
She picks up a piece of recycled paper from the table, one of the raw materials before it becomes something else.
“But then I remember that I couldn’t live that way. That gnawing feeling that you’re not solving anything, that you’re just moving things around to make rich people’s homes look nice… I couldn’t live with that. So this is the price I pay. The instability, the doubt, the exhaustion. It’s the price of being able to sleep at night.”
“Next semester, I’ll be teaching at the National University of Architecture and Construction,” she says, and there’s something like relief in her voice. “And also at the Academy of Fine Arts. I want to put this thinking into younger minds. I want them to understand from the beginning that design is not decoration. That creativity is not separate from responsibility.”
I ask if she sees the students as the future of this movement.
“I see them as the only hope,” she says bluntly. “Because my generation, we learned the hard way. We had to break our own patterns, question our own assumptions. But if I can teach them to ask the right questions from the start, to see design as problem-solving, to understand their responsibility to materials and to the world… maybe they’ll build something better than what I’ve built.”
She pauses.
“Or maybe they’ll just become corporate designers making products for profit. That’s possible too. I can’t control that. I can only plant seeds.”
As I prepare to leave, Mariam walks me through the studio one more time. She points out things she’s working on, half-finished experiments, materials waiting to be transformed. Everything in here tells the story of someone who has chosen the difficult path, not because it’s noble, but because it’s the only path that makes sense to her.
“This,” she says, holding up a piece of felted textile that seems to glow in the fading light, “took me six months to get right. Six months of failing, adjusting, failing again. And now it’s perfect. And it’s also completely unmarketable because it takes too long to make and people won’t pay what it costs.”
She smiles, but it’s a sad smile.
“So it exists. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. And it probably won’t become a product. It will just exist in this studio as proof that I was here, that I was thinking, that I was trying.”
There’s no bitterness in this, which somehow makes it more powerful. She’s made peace with the fact that most of her work will never be seen, will never be purchased, will never contribute to paying her rent. And she continues to do it anyway.
“That’s the part nobody tells you about being an artist,” she says as I’m putting on my shoes. “That most of what you create will be invisible. Most of your work will be for the work itself, not for recognition or money or legacy. And you have to be okay with that, or you’ll go insane.”
I ask her, as I’m leaving, what she wants the world to know about her work.
She thinks for a long time.
“That it’s not special,” she says finally. “That’s what I want them to know. This work isn’t special. Anyone can do it. Anyone can look at something that’s trash and ask: what can this become? Anyone can refuse to throw things away. Anyone can choose to make things with intention. The only thing required is the willingness to do the right thing.
We at Armvault wish, may your future endeavors feel like yours. Authentically, unmistakably, unapologetically yours. May your hard work what you desire and believe and no just what people expect. May you build something that feels true to you. May you have the space and support to do it your way.
Whatever you’re creating, building, or becoming there , may it be genuinely, fully you.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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